Laïla von Alvensleben is the Head of Culture and Collaboration at MURAL, where she manages a distributed team of 200+ across multiple continents and time zones. She is a champion for the “remote first” approach to collaboration, empowering MURAL’s rapidly growing team to successfully work from anywhere.
Laïla’s background is in UX design, having worked on digital product design at Hanno and educational workshops at Hyper Island. She helped create the Remote Starter Kit and is one of the first members of the Remote Work Association, a network that organizes online events to promote location-independent jobs. She has spoken at key industry events including NEXT in Hamburg, The Remote Work Summit, Nomad City and Ravensbourne University in London.

Jonas Vonlanthen is a pioneer in agile management and self-organisation in Switzerland. As Partner at Liip, he lead the implementation of Liip in Lausanne in 2011 and the development of the digital agency in the french-speaking part of Switzerland. Since 2015, he focuses on the organisation’s evolution from a hierarchical to a self-managed governance system.

Gathering more than 170 collaborators, Liip is a key player of the digital environment in Switzerland. Its non-conventional structure is one of the key success factors which allowed the company to develop at an accelerated pace for the past years.

Jonas will present how a decentralised, non-hierarchical and self-organised structure fosters Liip’s success. He will also address the pitfalls and opportunities of this journey.

Professor Marc Gruber is Vice President for Innovation at EPFL, full professor at the College of Management of Technology at EPFL where he holds the Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization (ENTC), and co-author of “Where to Play: 3 Steps for Discovering your most valuable Market Opportunities”, the latest addition to the lean startup toolset.

Marc also acted as Associate (2013-2016) and as Deputy Editor (2017-2020) at the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), the highest ranked empirical research journal in the management domain. In an independent research study on the most impactful entrepreneurship scholars (Gupta et al., 2016), Marc was ranked as the worldwide #1 researcher in entrepreneurship for the 2005-2015 period (shared #1 spot), and among the worldwide top 5 for the 2000-2015 period.

Katie leads the experience strategy for Allstate online marketing products including the Allstate.com quoting experiences and My Account. Originally educated as a theatre director, she brings a unique perspective to digital work. She believes if brands wish to truly connect with consumers they must combine emotion and utility, storytelling and technology. Prior to joining Allstate, Katie was a UX Director at FCB Chicago where she was the UX lead on the 2016 global redesign of JackDaniels.com as well as leading experience design for many other clients such as Cox Communications, and Toyota Financial Services.

Yves Pigneur is Honorary Professor at University of Lausanne HEC. He is considered a «mastermind» among business strategics. His tools have been used by numerous companies such as P&G, Amazon, and Tesla. He is the co-creator of the Value Proposition Canvas and the Business Model Canvas. Ranked No. 4 of the top 50 management thinkers worldwide Pigneur & Osterwalder also hold the Thinkers50 Strategy Award.

Ramatoulaye A. Diallo is currently the award-winning CEO of Orange Money in Sénégal and Director of Mobile Financial Services in the Orange Sonatel cluster across 5 countries. Her mission is to create products, services and communities that elevate millions of African lives. Throughout her 20+ year career, Rama has been a driving force in promoting inclusion, economic growth and entrepreneurship in telecoms, technology and e-commerce in Africa. Her career started on Wall Street as an intern in Asset Management at Goldman Sachs and an analyst at Morgan Stanley. Subsequently, as a leader and manager at Emerging Capital Partners, Endeavor South Africa and Etisalat Nigeria, she has leveraged her experience and expertise in corporate finance, venture capital, private equity and investment banking to help small companies, large corporations, and nonprofit organizations achieve financial and strategic growth objectives. She has also started and managed entrepreneurial ventures in Nigeria and South Africa.

Rama has a MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA magna cum laude in Mathematics & Economics from Bryn Mawr College. Rama also holds a Diploma in Practitioner Coaching and Leadership Development.

Thomas Wiesel is a major name on the french-speaking swiss stand-up scene (yes, it exists, or so Thomas says).

After an economics degree, he quit his incredibly fulfilling job as an accountant to venture on stage and has since performed around Switzerland as well as in Paris, Brussels, London, Montreal and South Africa.

He’s been seen on TV and heard on the radio in Switzerland and France and even hosted a late night show in a timeslot where everybody was sleeping, including thankfully his TV bosses. He performs mostly in French, except when his audience speaks English, in which cases he’ll graciously adapt and try to hide his slight accent, otherwise women cannot concentrate because of how turned on they become.

He obviously wrote this bio himself.

Captain Watson is a marine wildlife conservation and environmental activist from Toronto, Canada. He was one of the founding members and directors of Greenpeace.

In 1977, Captain Watson left Greenpeace and founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. He has served as Master and Commander on seven different Sea Shepherd ships since 1978 and continues to lead Sea Shepherd campaigns for Sea Shepherd USA (SSCS).

Alongside his crew he has starred in seven seasons of Animal Planet’s television series Whale Wars. Captain Watson has received many awards and commendations over the years. In 1996, he was awarded an honorary citizenship to the French town of St. Jean Cap Ferrat.

Previous to that he was made an honorary citizen of the Florida Keys in 1989. Other awards include Toronto City TV’s Environmentalist of the Year Award for 1990, the Genesis Award in 1998, and he was inducted into the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2002.

He was also awarded the George H.W. Bush Daily Points of Light Award in 1999 for his volunteer efforts with conservation activism.

In 2000 Captain Watson was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the environmental heroes of the 20th Century.

Kai is an experienced leader in the Design and Innovation Industry, who has developed vision, strategy and launches for both Google product teams and it’s top partners. As Head of UX Methods and Process, she creates and scales programs to enable the culture and mindsets that drive improved product quality. As one of the founders and leads of the Google Sprint Master Academy, she has trained over 800 Sprint Masters to drive innovation across Google’s diverse product areas. She is passionate about creating and teaching human-centered methodologies that increase cross-functional collaboration to create more meaningful products that improve people’s lives and the world. Prior to leading UX Methods and Process, she founded the Design Relations team to support design excellence on Google platforms and she drove monetization opportunities on the Search Ads team in Google Search. She earned a Masters Degree in Design from CCA, where she focused sustainable design practices and creating positive impact in the world.

In this talk Kai will share how Google has quickly adapted their approach to cross-functional collaboration and innovation during these times of change, shifting to working entirely remotely and optimizing UX methods, Design Sprints and tools for this new environment.